Photography
Alessandro ZUEK Simonetti
The Trilogy By Scott Campbell
During the Karl
Lagerfeld Pirelli
calendar launch in
Moscow,
Renato Montagner,
creative director of
Pirelli PZero,
commissioned artist
Scott Campbell to
create two signature
projects.
to engrave a Pirelli tire
and to design a special
edition PZero bike
jacket by Dainese. In the
summer of 2011, Campbell
began working on these
pieces in his Brooklyn
studio in New York.
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Scott Campbell is behind The Trilogy, a project based on the first tattooed tyre. The American artist has made an art out of tattoos, ultimately gaining recognition as a "tattoo artist".
He is to present his tyre work on 20 September at the event for the opening of Pirelli Corso Venezia.
By engraving the tyre with a gouge, Campbell has drawn on a Pirelli Diablo Rosso II tread the distinctive marks of his art, principally the eye, heart and skull, symbols of a passionate and dynamic approach to life.
The same elements are played out on a special edition carbon jacket. The prototype, made in collaboration with Dainese, is also tattooed on the inside with sacred and profane icons. They include St Christopher, the patron saint of motorcyclists.
The triune project also includes the Ducati bike, fitted with the tattooed tyres.
"The birth of this operation took place last December in Moscow, at the launch of the Pirelli calendar. Renato Montagner, creative director of Pirelli PZero, suggested that I tattoo a tyre, a bike and a jacket. I agreed straightaway and with enthusiasm as these three elements are my world which revolves around drawing and fast pace. I stayed up a whole night to study how and what to engrave on the rubber, one of the few materials I've never worked with before. To make the prototype I worked as a craftsman, like a tailor cutting and stitching. Unfortunately the spread of computers and the mouse is wiping out the art of manual work".
"In Campbell's romantic engineering", Montagner claimed, "we found many affinities with the Pirelli culture. The result of the The Trilogy project iconises to perfection the combination of technique and passion of the P Lunga, with the mark of a new tyrography".
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Scott Campbell and Dainese for Pirelli leather jacket
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Born in Louisiana in 1977, Campbell started out as an illustrator, an experience which taught him to see tattoos as stories via highly symbolic signs and images.
He soon won the consensus and friendship of stars such as Orlando Bloom for whom he personalised a bike, and Sting, whom he has tattooed several times. Campbell however has gone further and extended the most tribal of practices of decoration of the human skin to the sphere of objects, using an electric needle and inks like a painter's brush and, at the same time, a sculptor's chisel. Thus epochal works have been created, such as the sheaves of real dollars stacked up and carved into 3D sculptures or the famous ostrich eggs tattooed on the inside in a message of rebirth.
Campbell recently went to Afghanistan to tattoo US soldiers, exhibiting the result of this experiment at Art Basel in Miami. He currently lives in New York and works in his studio, Saved Tattoo, in Williamsburg in the hip borough of Brooklyn. -
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Scott Campbell for Pirelli PZero
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